Assessment

This week I did an oral vocabulary quiz with my Spanish 3 students about movies. I used the website Lingt Language to administer the quiz. It consisted of 7 questions in Spanish that I recorded ahead of time. The students click on a speech bubble and hear the question. They can listen as many times as they want. Then they click the other speech bubble and it records their answer that they say. They can delete their answers and re-record if they make a mistake. At the bottom they click submit and enter their name. This then gives me their name and all their recorded answers on my homepage.

I was looking for something to use my class iPod touches with for this assessment but didn’t come up with anything on time so I went with Lingt because I’d used it in the past for other types of assessments. The downfall is that it requires Flash so can’t be used with iPods or iPads. It was SO QUICK to make and easy to listen and grade the assessments.

If you want to see what my assessment was like, click here then click on Spanish 3 and Vamos al cine. Feel free to test stuff out. Just don’t submit your answers. 🙂

Lingt Language is free but limits how many assignments you can upload to classes I think. That’s changed a bit since the last time I used it so I need to read up on how it works again. If you’ve got questions as to how to make this assessment, let me know and I’ll try to upload a how-to video. It’s pretty intuitive once you mess around a bit.

Spanish 3 is working through a movie unit now. I was gone Monday (no Spanish-speaking subs around me) so had students copy new vocab and do some book activities to get familiar with it then gave them a PQA (Personal Questions and Answers) sheet to expand.

Tuesday we did a Zachary Jones (@ZJonesSpanish) sheet about planning a night to the movies. I had them expand and say what kind of movie it is, why they chose it, who the stars are, etc.

Wednesday I had students choose a a Spanish-language movie at random from the hat and they researched it and made a movie poster that told what type of movie it is, where it’s from, the actors, the director, a brief plot summary and any other interesting info they found on it.

Thursday for warm up, the students wrote a simple version of the plot of Cinderella. Then students did a gallery walk of the posters and gathered info from the posters (name of movie, type, one sentence basic idea of plot). We wrapped up with about 15 minute conversation circle (round 2) which went great. Students were really into talking about movies and everyone got into the conversation.

My plans to assess the vocab of movies is an oral quiz. I will give students a sheet with information about a familiar movie in English. Next they will listen to recorded questions in Spanish from me about the movie. I’ll ask things such as: What kind of movie is it? Will it make me laugh/cry/afraid? Who are the stars in it? What’s it about? Students will then record their answers to the questions. I’m choosing this type of assessment because I asked myself, what do we do with movies? We talk about them! We make recommendations! We tell people the good parts or the bad parts and advise them if they should go or not. We find common ground over movies and expand our horizons. Next week we’ll be doing some practice prepping for this assessment before they do the “real” thing. I’ll post an update on how this goes!